La Lucha

La Lucha
147 Avenue A
New York, NY 10009
212-260-0235
official website

I want Rib Tacos, and cebollitas!

New York Transit Plan: An Archetype For Transit Systems Everywhere?

New York City is struggling with some enormous fiscal issues in municipal government. Various factors — decreases in tax revenues and the downturn caused by the self-immolation of the finace sector and Wall Street — have left the city disastrously short of money. But if we step back and view this in a larger light, we can see that what is happening in NYC will ultimately occur in all cities in the US and perhaps globally. The Econolypse will force a reappraisal of funding of services, like transit: where will the money come from?

While Obama and Co. may turn around some much needed help for state governments and infrastructure development, it is not clear at all how those actions will trinkle down to municipal transit. In the meantime, the shortfalls are already happening, and cities — like NYC — are having to take steps to cover the widening gap in revenues.

[from Mixed Reviews on Transit Plan by William Neuman and Jeremy Peters]

A central element of a financial rescue plan for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority — charging tolls on East River and Harlem River bridges — met with sharp opposition from elected officials across the city after the plan was officially released on Thursday.

State legislators, mainly from Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx, said the plan by a state commission headed by Richard Ravitch, a former authority chairman, would unfairly burden drivers from their districts.

But many of those same legislators, along with some business leaders, were more supportive of another part of the plan: a proposed tax of one-third of 1 percent on payrolls in the 12-county region served by the authority, which includes New York City, Long Island and five counties north of the city.

“It’d be an extreme hardship to have to pay a toll every time,” said Assemblywoman Helene E. Weinstein, a Democrat from Brooklyn. “We’re talking about people going to work, people going to doctor’s appointments, elderly people.”

The Ravitch plan is meant to head off a proposed 23 percent increase in revenue from fares and tolls and deep cuts in subway, bus and commuter rail service next year that the authority says it needs to help close a $1.2 billion budget gap. The plan calls for fewer service cuts, if any, and a fare and toll revenue jump of 8 percent.

So, how should a region — like the 12 county area served by the MTA — manage its transit services? The current model is that the state legislature empowers a state commission who recommends a course of action which the legistature may ammend, ignore, or enact.

On a more ethical basis, we can view the transit system as a shared resource that emparts certain benefits for everyone in the region, not just for those that directly use it. If cleaning ladies can’t ride the subway to get to the homes of well-to-do bankers, then the cost of cleaning homes will have to go up and the number of cars on the roads will rise. The bankers and the cleaning ladies both benefit, and by extension, so do the clients of the bankers and the children of the cleaning ladies. And so on.

So, who should pay? It is clearly regressive to simply raise the cost of riding the T, since this puts the full burden of the shared benefits on those least able to afford it, and with the least ability to demand a higher wage for their services.

A social benefit might come from taxing automobiles driving through the region, since in principle one goal is to drop the number of cars on the road and increase ridership on the T. Note, however, the paradox that comes from success: more people will stop driving and ride the T, which will drop revenues again, although not right away.

The payroll tax again puts a burden on working people, and is to some extent regressive, since the corporations that employ these people don’t have to contribute a nickel.

The payroll tax would apply to all wages paid to employees at companies in the region, as well as at government agencies and nonprofit organizations like hospitals. Self-employed people would also have to pay.

It would be administered by a newly created capital finance arm within the authority, which would use the revenue after the first year to pay debt service on bonds for the next five-year capital program. The money would be kept in a separate account dedicated to capital programs.

Because the authority has other budgetary actions contemplated to cover about half of the $1.2 billion deficit it expects next year, some payroll tax revenue would be left over to relieve the state and city of some of their financial obligations to the authority in 2009.

The bridge tolls would help buy new buses and build new depots and pay for the creation of bus corridors in which buses could operate more quickly, separated partly or completely from other traffic. Such a corridor has been opened in the Bronx.

What seems to be missing in this picture is a corresponding rise in corporate taxes: why not a 1% increase there? Doesn’t the business sector wind up being the biggest beneficiary of a working transit system? Shouldn’t the banker’s bank and the cleaning ladies cleaning company pay, if the banker in his car and the cleaning lady on the T both pay?

Note that business leaders are lining up to support the plan, which should be no surprise, since they are in favor of having the cost fobbed off on the straphangers and working people:

Kathryn S. Wylde, the president of the Partnership for New York City, a prominent business group, said that the Ravitch plan was “fair and balanced” and that “it really does merit the support of the business community.”

Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, was more measured, saying that his organization supported tolls but worried about other tax increases beyond the proposed payroll tax.

“If it’s kept small, and other taxes are held, we’ll probably support it,” Mr. Spinola said.

You can tell who the politicians look to for campaign contributions, I guess.

This is patently unfair, and stands an egregious example of all the politicos leaning strongly in the wrong direction, and taxing the disenfranchised while the power elite get a free ride. This is the wrong way to create a strong regional transit system, which should be based on a fair system of regional financing.

Rainwater Harvesting

Great piece in the New York Times about rainwater harvesting: collecting the rain to augment or replace other water sources for gardening.

[from In the Garden - Raindrops Keep Falling in My Tank - NYTimes.com by Anne Raver]

Last week, Mr. [Lenny] Librizzi [assistant director of the open space greening programs at the Council on the Environment of New York City], Edie Stone, the director of GreenThumb, and I visited a few of these community gardens in Brooklyn and Queens. The first of the systems in these gardens, completed in 2002 by a coalition of city greening organizations called the Water Resources Group was designed and built by Mr. Librizzi and Mr. Chellberg for the 1100 Block Bergen Street Garden, in Crown Heights, in Brooklyn.

The huge garden covers five house lots, so the designers linked a line of nine 55-gallon recycled olive barrels, with one spigot, to collect water from two adjacent roofs. Gardeners would cart the water to the raised beds with watering cans or pails. That was a vast improvement over hooking up to the fire hydrant, but it was hard to maintain, said Yvonne Harris, who has worked in the garden for 28 years. “It had a lot of leaks,” she said, “and sometimes we would arrive to find no water in the barrels.”

Last year, through a grant from Organic Gardening magazine, the garden acquired a 1,000-gallon tank, which makes water collection easier. Mr. Librizzi and Chellberg also improved their design of the system. It now sends the first flush of rain, which is apt to be full of particulates, into a U-shaped tube; cleaner rainwater flows into the tank, and overflow is directed underground, through a pipe that opens into a bed of moisture-loving hostas and ferns beneath a pear tree.

Gardeners at the Long Island City Roots Garden, in the middle of a sun-baked lot on 47th Avenue between 29th and 30th Streets in Queens, had no roof from which to collect rainwater. So they built a shelter with a V-shaped fiberglass roof, about 200 square feet, which not only provides shade but directs rainwater into sheet metal piping connected to a 300-gallon tank.

Another simple system, at the Brooklyn Bears Carleton Avenue Community Garden in Brooklyn, collects rainwater from the roof of a nearby church, funneling it into a 1,000-gallon tank at the top of the sloped site. The overflow runs down brick channels to a rain garden full of plants that like wet feet.

Harvesting rainwater is like growing your own food. It puts you in touch with the seasons and where your water comes from.

[…]

VISITING community gardens is a good way to compare rainwater harvesting systems. A manual on how to build one will soon be available online, through the Council on the Environment (212-788-7900; cenyc.org), and Lenny Librizzi of the Council on the Environment of New York City, will answer questions by e-mail, at llibrizzi@cenyc.org, or phone, (212) 788-7927.

If you have a small garden, you may only need a 165-gallon tank. He bought his for $313, including shipping, from Tank Depot, in Pompano Beach, Fla. (866-926-5603; tankdepot.com).

If you want to store more water, you may prefer a 500-gallon tank (about $300, plus shipping) or a 1,000-gallon tank (about $500). Prices vary according to the design and size of the tank. “I would encourage people to look at two or three different Web sites,” Mr. Librizzi said. Other suppliers include WaterTanks.com, in Windsor, Calif. (877-655-1100; watertanks.com), and Stark Environmental, in Columbia, Pa. (717-684-8864; starkenvironmental.com).

The typical home owner with a deck garden might get by with a rig using a 40 gallon barrel like this ($129.00 plus shipping from Gardeners.com)

coupled with a downspout diverter like this ($29.95 plus shipping):

Note that the diverter is self-governing: when the barrel is full, the water runs down the downspout!